When I was younger I remember hearing people say things like “the state can’t love you” or “the state can’t love people”, and I think the comment was often made in reference to state welfare programs being sort of impersonal, inferior replacements to, say, aid from your local church or group of friends. And I heard that, but I don’t think I really “got it”… yeah OK the state can’t “love you” but it can help you and that’s kind of what people often need, right?
The twilight zone activity in our nation which increasingly doesn’t deserve the word “pandemic response”, as it walks further away from anything that can be justified as necessary for disease response, and as it shows no signs of ending, really brought home for me the truth that the technocratic state doesn’t care about you. Or, we might say it better, the technocratic state doesn’t care about you. The state can’t love you (mother was right!). On its very, very best day, it cares about producing “optimal” outcomes on a statistical level for the masses, very much akin to what some of us did as kids when we played SimCity.
Often we can’t even say that, and we could talk about the corruption and graft and desire for power and control and tribalism that actually motivates a lot of state action. But even on its best day, the technocratic state doesn’t care about you. You are part of a statistical ensemble.
This is why, when the governor of New York talked about firing nurses who wouldn’t be vaccinated, she could say forthrightly that they would just be replaced. If a cog in the machine stops working you just grab another cog. The technocratic state doesn’t care that you’ve had that job for 30 years. It doesn’t know who you are. It doesn’t care that you’ve already had COVID and are better protected than your coworker vaccinated eight months ago anyway. The technocratic state doesn’t and cannot care about people on that level. Entirely reasonable concerns that almost anyone would respect on a person-to-person level just get steamrolled over.
Or,
What do we do about this? I don’t have any easy answers here. Reject technocracy and stop voting for technocrats. You might say I’m making the case that, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, you should be able to meet your leaders under the tree instead of taking orders from an untouchable agency a thousand miles away. That would certainly help. Or you might say that I’m making the case for does-much-less-stuff government generally. I was also struck by this Chesterton quotation today.
I frequently say that Chesterton had a time machine that allowed him to see the 21st century… but the real truth is that these patterns repeat in human society again and again. You’ve almost certainly heard this cliché before, I’m hearing it a lot lately, “strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times, bad times make strong men”. (We could add an “and you are here” arrow to the above, you know.) But another way to say that, which perhaps we are living through, is that societies will forget why X is important until they lose X, and then see the harm that comes from having lost X, at which point a sort of mass realization that X is important will occur, and then there will be a movement to get X back.
And that’s how it actually goes even if it has happened a dozen times before, because people don’t know that history (mostly), and if they do there is some reason it is different this time. That’s not a very optimistic ending for a post but it does seem to me that this is what we are living through.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
Great quotes, and Ame's ties in with a quote I have for technocracy.
"In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle:who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."
So modern, really makes one wonder who said it. Maybe the Australian health director? No, he said we are locking out the unvaxxed from our economy so we can stop the lockdown. The above quote is from Leon Trotsky.
I want to believe in the semi-optimistic conclusion here ("nothing new under the sun") as a reminder that history has cyclical elements and the things that really matter (literature and arts, scientific progress, theological insight) are the things that survive through multiple cycles. That's a good reminder to invest in those things, rather than the ones that will pass away and be of no benefit to future generations (let alone to eternity!)
At the same time, I sense that there is "something new" about the toolkit that technocracy has available now. The quality of information is much higher due to consumer analytics in digital media, and the ability to parse that information with automation has basically tracked with Moore's Law. This has created the possibility of "nudge totalitarianism" or even "carrot totalitarianism" in a way that didn't exist before. Indeed, a number of recent political controversies have basically been screens for the implementation of the infrastructure required for social credit and constant consumer monitoring. In 1984, Big Brother still depends on normal informants that need to deceive you into revealing your noncooperation with the state. Today, our browser history lets us do that to ourselves. (I mean, I'm sure *you* have good opsec, but that's not standard for more trusting people with less education/paranoia. And even then -- here we are, posting on Substack under our own names!)
I really want to believe this collapse cycle can still complete normally in the historical way so we can reboot on the other side of it. I feel a much stronger identification now with the imprecatory prophets who call out for humbling of mighty empires, the stuff in the final chapters of Jeremiah. I understand that this is promised in some sense (we see enough of the end of the story to know that), but the usual paradox of any category of prayer is that everyone still cries out earnestly for the purposes of God to be accomplished, even despite knowing this is inevitable in a cosmological sense.